Money and maps: is this how to save the Amazon’s 400bn trees?

Alarmed by the impact of logging, indigenous Peruvians are using satellite mapping to manage their land

The first thing Ramn heard about the deal was the televisions. A number of families from the Ashninka indigenous group had received them from outsiders, in exchange for land. Loggers were interested in the mahogany, oak and tornillo trees that grow to impressive heights in this part of the rainforest around Cutivireni in central Peru.

The loggers had other means of persuasion, besides bribery. They might offer to build a school or a meeting house in exchange for timber. When the work ran over budget, they would demand money and since the Ashninka had none, they would take more trees to service the debt, according to Adelaida Bustamante, the community treasurer. And if that failed, they used violence. In 2014, four forest defenders from the Ashninka were murdered for their campaign to keep loggers off their land(Ramn asked me not to use his real name).

Conflict such as this over land, timber and forest has taken on huge significance in the global struggle to confront the climate emergency and keep the world from overheating. According to the 2018 International Panel on Climate Change report, halting deforestation is essential to prevent climate catastrophe. A study this summer indicated the huge potential of tree planting and retention for stabilising the worlds climate.

But in the Amazon, remote communities come under sustained pressure financial, physical and, yes, televisual to clear their land and surrender their trees. Almost 60% of Peru (675,000 square kilometres, or 260,000 square miles) is covered by Amazon forest. Perus primary forest, where you find the lofty hardwoods so prized by commercial timber traders, is shrinking at an alarming rate: Global Forest Watch reported that Peru lost 140,185 hectares (346,405 acres) of primary forest in 2018. Ashninka territory spans a protected area of primary forest across the east of Peru, near the border with Brazil, so their lands are effectively a buffer zone.

Ramn discovered that, besides TVs and other gifts, people in the Cutivireni area were being offered a derisory price for their timber. He persuaded the community not to sell their part of the forest, and insisted they give back the TV sets. The loggers retreated, but it was pretty clear they would not give up. Working in secret, for fear of retaliation from the loggers, Ramn tried to come up with a long-term strategy for preserving the rainforest. He spoke to a Welsh anthropologist, Dilwyn Jenkins, who had been living in the region and studying the Ashninka people for decades. Jenkins, who died in 2014, suggested the community contact Cool Earth, a rainforest charity set up in 2007 by MP Frank Field.

The Ashninka know all about external threats. For years they survived a terror onslaught from the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas, who targeted young men to join their ranks and occupied villages that then came under retaliatory fire from government forces. In the 1990s, after the guerrillas were defeated, narco-traffickers slipped into their place, offering a high price for remote land for cultivating coca. They restored an airstrip that missionaries had built in Cutivireni in the 1970s and used it to transport drugs and weapons.

After the years of conflict, the Ashninka face a new threat. The greatest driver of deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon is now subsistence farming, and as the population grows in these more peaceful times, there is an urgent push to grow more food. A study published in May this year, by Princeton University, on biodiversity loss in Peru, showed that in the western Amazon, smallholder slash-and-burn agriculture is the primary driver of forest destruction. The main method of farming among the Ashninka involves felling trees to make a clearing, creating space in the sunlight where their food crops can grow.

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So part of the Cool Earth project involves giving local people the information they need to make their farming practices more efficient and less destructive. Director Matthew Owen says that while campaigns against industrial-style palm and soya plantations are working, the focus must now switch to smallholders agriculture, which is responsible for keeping deforestation emissions stubbornly high.

Figuring out how to support better lives while keeping the forest standing deserves some of the innovation billions that go to carbon storage and better batteries, Owen says.

This much is clear from observations on the ground. After a long walk through the cool of the Cutivireni forest, past towering tornillo trees and mashonastes with their great buttressed trunks, dangling orchids and tree ferns suddenly, a clearing.